Paper Texture Packs

Hello Zine readers! Simon from here today. I just wanted to let you know that my folded paper texture packs, and are now available on the Arsenal! I hope you enjoy this textures tutorial, teaching you to add fake folds to your designs in a jiffy with the folded paper texture packs!

What’s in the packs?

Glad you asked. Each pack contains a series of 12 textures each. The textures are roughly 4740 x 6320px @ 600 dpi.

The pack is centered around folded and crumpled paper, from a simple vertical and horizontal folds all the way to crazy crumpled and over-folded paper. Check these examples below:

These should cover a decent chunk of your folded and crumpled paper emulation needs.

How to use these textures

Just like the photocopy noise textures I released a few weeks back, the textures are black and white, which dictates some of the workflow to follow. about blending modes I found on PhotoBlogStop gives us this information about the Screen blending mode:

Screen: Similar to the Lighten blend mode, but brighter and removes more of the dark pixels, and results in smoother transitions. Works somewhat like the Multiply blend mode, in that it multiplies the light pixels (instead of the dark pixels like the Multiply blend mode does). As an analogy, imagine the selected layer and each of the underlying layers as being 35mm slides, and each slide being placed in a separate projector (one slide for each projector), then all of the projectors are turned on and pointed at the same projector screen…this is the effect of the Screen blend mode. This is a great mode for making blacks disappear while keeping the whites, and for making glow effects.

Keeping this information in mind, here are a few ways to use the textures.

Add the texture within your layer stack

The scenario: you just want to add paper folds as the finishing touch to your print.

In order to give this piece an extra “vintage movie poster” feel, I’ll simply add folded-paper-textures-volume-01-sbh-001.jpg from to the top of my layer stack.

Once that’s done, simply change the blending mode to Screen, and you’ll have some fake folds in your poster!

If the effect is too strong, you simply have to play with the layer’s opacity slider to make the effect more or less subtle. Below is the same texture at 50% opacity instead of 100%.

The scenario: you want to use some of the more exotic textures as part of your design itself.

There are some less conventional folds in the packs. For instance, in, there’s this burst-like thing (folded-paper-textures-volume-02-sbh-006.jpg):

While this might be a bit corny, I’d like to use the burst-like folds behind the design (and the silhouette in particular) to create some divine rays of some kind. Let’s start by placing the texture at the bottom of my Design layer group.

Composition wise, I think it could be more interesting if the rays were coming from behind the head of the silhouette.

Now, we simply have to use the Screen blending mode to our advantage again, so we can see the background effects of the piece again.

Since the effect is still a hair too strong, I simply decided to lower the opacity of the texture layer to 25%, and we get something much more subtle.

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